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This paper has been timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the publication of In Search of Excellence. Observing this anniversary, the paper aims to offer a critical review of the works of Tom Peters – a man vaunted as the guru of management. Reviewers have observed that Tom Peters' narratives of business build and depend upon organizational stories to achieve their effects. Recognising that tales of the organization play an important role in sensemaking and sensegiving endeavours, this paper reviews Peters' organizational storytelling in the light of critical academic reflection in this arena.

The paper analyses the eight key works on management produced by Tom Peters between 1982 and 2003 from a storytelling perspective. Building upon Yiannis Gabriel's account of the essence of the poetic tale, the paper compiles a catalogue of Tom Peters' storywork.

On the strength of the cataloguing exercise, the paper charts a decline in this guru's storytelling; the predominance of certain story types; Peters' transmutation from narrator for, to hero of, the business world.

While acknowledging the need for further research and analysis, the paper suggests that the quantitative and qualitative changes evident in Peters' storywork catalogue suggest that this guru's connection to the world of business has become increasingly remote and unproductive. Accordingly, this review questions Peters' status as an organizational storyteller/organizational “sensegiver”, and so, questions his future prospects as a guru.

This chapter offers a reading of the inclusion of Susan Glaspell's short story, A Jury of Her Peers, in the casebook, Procedure. What does it mean that the editors turn to a secular, literary narrative to ground a consideration of “The Problem of Judgment?” How should we read the irony of the reading instructions they provide, which reproduce the blindness to form – to the significance of “trifles” – that the text describes? How do we read literature in the context of law? More specifically, what does attention to the form of the story yield for an understanding of legal judgment?

Theoretically, a contribution of this article is the pinpointed connection between corporate ethics and trust in intra‐corporate relationships. Furthermore, it contributes to a conceptual framework that distinguishes between the constructs of business ethics and corporate ethics. The authors also provide a grounded conceptual framework of corporate ethics and trust. The principal dyadic determinants of corporate ethics in intra‐corporate relationships are interpreted to be management behaviour versus employee perception of that behaviour. Empirically, the contribution is an in‐depth and longitudinal case description that underpins the topic and the discussion provided in the article.

To explore how young men operating within influential discursive regimes construct their identity projects and come to know themselves through their engagement with consumption and leisure practices.

Foucauldian theory is drawn upon to conceptualise men as intertwined within their social environs, the recipients of socio-cultural inscription. By situating the micro-social context of the male consumer in a larger socio-cultural context, this study endeavours to go beyond consumer narratives to incorporate the influence of market and social systems on individuals’ identity work.

This study shows how identity projects are subject to the workings of power coursing through social networks. Individuals prescribing to a particular identity become subjected to the regulatory mechanisms of their community. However it is shown how subjectification operates differently in the highly structured community of sport compared to the less structured community of a hometown dwelling.

This sociological perspective on men’s identity practices highlights the dynamic power forces penetrating social communities, in turn showing the necessity for consumer researchers to anchor the individual consumer experience within their influential environment to gain a more robust understanding of consumer behaviours and consumption practices.

This paper explores the individual’s constructions of identity as situated within historically and locally particular cultural practices. This approach allows a better understanding of how consumers negotiate the world around them, keeping in mind the socio-cultural forces that serve to constrain and enable their activity, both in their daily lives and in the marketplace.

This collection of stories captures the lives of people whose lives have changed as a consequence of the policy to close long‐stay hospitals. Not everyone lived in a long‐stay hospital, but those who haven't probably would have if they were still around. They give a snapshot of the impact of probably the most important public policy in the UK to affect people with learning difficulties over the last 40 years.

Examines two important streams of migrant consumer research, specifically the contributions made by the study of cultural values and migrant acculturation. Noting the inadequacies of focusing on just one single perspective, reports an interpretative research conducted with ethnic Chinese migrant consumers. Emergent themes are extracted to illustrate the lived worlds of migrant consumers as they negotiate their way in a new society.

The impetus for this paper was the Channel 5 documentary Who Cares for Gary? and the combined efforts of the author, her family and friends to challenge practice within one of the units featured. The paper describes a fundamentally disruptive sequence of decisions and events in the life of the author's brother and affirms that the consequences of abuse and mechanisms to challenge it go beyond individual suffering.

An ensemble is an intermediate unit of work between action and activity in the hierarchical framework proposed by classical activity theory. Ensembles are the mid‐level of activity, offering more flexibility than objects, but more purposeful structure than actions. The paper aims to introduce the notion of ensembles to understand the way object‐related activities are instantiated in practice.

The paper presents an analysis of the practices of professional information workers in two different companies using direct and systematic observation of human behavior. It also provides an analysis and discussion of the activity theory literature and how it has been applied in areas such as human‐computer interaction and computer‐supported collaborative work.

The authors illustrate the relevance of the notion of ensembles for activity theory and suggest some benefits of this conceptualization for analyzing human work in areas such as human‐computer interaction and computer‐supported collaborative work.

The notion of ensembles can be useful for the development of a computing infrastructure oriented to more effectively supporting work activities.

The paper shows that the value of the notion of ensembles is to close a conceptual gulf not adequately addressed in activity theory, and to understand the practical aspects of the instantiation of objects over time.

Many organizations now utilize action learning, and it is applied increasingly throughout the world. Action learning appears in numerous variants, but generically it is a form of learning through experience, “by doing”, where the task environment is the classroom, and the task the vehicle. Two previous reviews of the action learning literature by Alan Mumford respectively covered the field prior to 1985 and the period 1985‐1994. Both reviews included books as well as journal articles. This current review covers the period 1994‐2000 and is limited to publicly available journal articles. Part 1 of the Review was published in an earlier issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning (Vol. 15 No. 2) and included a bibliography and comments. Part 2 extends that introduction with a schema for categorizing action learning articles and with comments on representative articles from the bibliography.